The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn
Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York
by Suleiman Osman
Oxford University Press
“Manhattan, the new Brooklyn?” asked Time Out New York in 2002, putting their hipster finger on the pulse of one of the most remarkable transformations in American history. Somehow the neighborhoods of Brooklyn have evolved in half a century from squalid residential and industrial slums into the nation’s most celebrated urban enclaves. Their very names — Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill — now invoke romantic images of lawyers, bankers, artists and journalists living side-by-side, all working for the public good and higher real estate values.
In the late 1960s, their residents successfully halted the bulldozer. They battled the immense, modernist, slum-clearance and rebuilding projects funded from Washington, and preserved instead their local historic buildings, streets and parks. Even the Brooklyn extremes — fragile neighborhoods like Gowanus and prosperous ones like Brooklyn Heights — share in the new zeitgeist. Like writer Truman Capote, they say, “I live in Brooklyn, by choice.”
But how did it happen and what does it mean? Not to mention, how much of this is mythology and how much is truth? Suleiman Osman, an assistant professor of American studies at George Washington University who grew up in Park Slope, is here to tell us. He has written what may well be the most important current book on New York.
He argues that while the triumph of brownstone Brooklyn reflects the collapse of New Deal liberalism and the rise of conservatism, its effectiveness lay in “the emergence of a new and dynamic type of localist politics that was both anti-statist and anti-corporatist,” emphasizing neighborhood autonomy, private rehabilitation of existing housing stock, devolution of municipal services and ethnic power. An educated, young middle class had seen beauty in the aging Victorian townhouses and industrial lofts across the East River in part, says Osman, because they were attracted by “the authenticity they felt was lacking in the new university campuses, government complexes and corporate skyscrapers they worked and studied in.”
In fairness to the planners who sought to demolish brownstone Brooklyn, the borough had its problems, including decades of disinvestment in an outmoded housing stock — 80% of which had been built before 1920. Fascinatingly enough, Osman adds some new information to this familiar figure: Despite their imposing facades, brownstones often had been shabbily built by 19th century speculators. Osman calls brownstones the suburban tract houses of their time, built quickly and haphazardly. The practical result was that 100 years later, brownstones needed huge capital investment to extend their useful lives.
The poor quality of construction beneath the handsome exterior produced one of the first — and most common — cultural conflicts over authenticity. For economic reasons, working-class owners of brownstones tended to replace facades, windows and floors with cheap modern materials. But, says Osman, when middle-class renovators in the 1970s complained about the paint and siding on brownstones, they were accusing their predecessors of destroying an architectural integrity that had never been there. “Brownstones had from their inception been a bricolage,” he writes, meaning that the builders made resourceful use of whatever materials were at hand, regardless of their original purpose.
To a certain extent, the concept of bricolage undermines the whole idea of authenticity. Cities are nothing if not enterprising, so who is to say which of many layers is the most original or authentic? Plus, many brownstoners were simply unable to distinguish the true from the phony.
Osman also graphically lays out the anti-industrial impulses of the newcomers, who quickly eradicated manufacturing enterprises from their residential blocks and successfully fought any government industrial support, including the Port Authority’s attempt to open a container port above Sunset Park. Yet Brooklyn’s authentic neighborhood heritage was precisely that of work mixed into residential — a favorite Jane Jacobs conviction that middle-class households often reject on their own blocks. Longshoremen, for example, historically lived in Boerum Hill (once called North Gowanus), worked on the waterfront, and came home for lunch. Today’s Boerum Hill has kept the worker housing, but has long since banished the work.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is director of the Regional Plan Association’s Center for Urban Innovation.